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Monthly Archives: September 2013

Gene Cernan, the last man on the moon, visited the Museum for a tour of our space technologies collections with Curator Doug Millard. Press Officer Will Stanley describes Gene’s encounter with his old spaceship.

Apollo 10 Command Module. Credit: Science Museum

This is the Apollo 10 Command Module, sent to the Moon and back by NASA in May 1969 as a dry run for the mission that would put the first men on the Moon. But it’s also known by another name, “Charlie Brown”, and this was how Lunar Module Pilot Eugene A. “Gene” Cernan greeted the module when he saw it this morning in the Science Museum.

I asked Gene what it felt like being reunited with Charlie Brown again, “You take yourself back in time to where you were. The view was out of this world.” And Gene should know. He’s been into space three times: as pilot of Gemini 9A (1966); lunar module pilot of Apollo 10 (1969); and as commander of Apollo 17 in December 1972, the last Apollo mission.

As only the 11th person to walk on the Moon – and the last to re-enter Apollo 17’s lunar module – Gene has the distinction of being the last man on the Moon. How long he will keep this unique title is still a matter of debate. “Curiosity is the essence of human existence. We have centuries of exploration on this planet alone. What’s around the corner? What’s across the ocean? It is our destiny to explore,” explains Gene.

Gene Cernan with Curator Doug Millard (r). Credit: Science Museum

Walking through our Exploring Space gallery with Curator Doug Millard, our conversation turns to the differences between manned and robotic space exploration. “This is the only computer that can respond to the unexpected,” says Gene, pointing to his brain. “You send humans to deal with the unexpected. To bring back things no one expected to find. That’s the purpose of exploration.”

We arrive in front of Apollo 10. “That’s Charlie Brown. I like to feel that by going to the Moon in Apollo 10 for a dry run, we made Apollo 11 far more successful.” Gene turns to us and jokes, “Where were you when Apollo 10 launched? I know where I was! Sat in that.”

His re-entry was one of the most dramatic ever seen. Apollo 10 holds the record as the fastest manned vehicle, reaching speeds of almost 40,000 km per hour (11.08 km/s or 24,791 mph to be exact) during its return to Earth on 26th May 1969. “It was 5 or 6 in the morning and we were like a shooting star coming in,” explains Gene. “On my Gemini mission I could see reds and greens, but for the Apollo 10 re-entry I saw purples and a white hot glow.”

After Gene spots an image of his excursions driving NASA’s Lunar Rover (Moon buggy) on display, I asked which was more fun, driving the rover or piloting “Snoopy”, the lunar module. “Flying Snoopy was pretty exciting, but driving a car in 1/6th of Earth’s gravity. Well if you get the chance, try it. It is a lot of fun. I truly believe we could go back and drive it again, but you might need to replace the batteries,” jokes Gene.

“Someone did a hell of a good job building it,” says Gene, looking at Apollo 10. “This not only got us there, it got us back again too. Every man who went to the moon came back.” The round trip to the moon took Apollo 10 eight days. Gene explains how he passed the time, “It was very busy, and pretty exciting. There were all kinds of experiments to do and we were getting ready for challenges ahead. On the way back, you look back and have to pinch yourself. The good news is you had the chance to do it, to go to the Moon. The bad news was that the time went so fast.

Our time is up. Gene takes a last look at Charlie Brown, his former home in space. “In Apollo 10, the three of us, Commander Thomas Stafford, Command Module Pilot John Young and me, we travelled faster than any other human beings ever.” It’s a claim very few can make.

On Thursday 26 September 2013, the Science Museum is offering visitors the rare opportunity to see the interior of the Apollo 10 Command Module via a handheld camera. Doug Millard, Deputy Keeper of Technologies and Engineering will be answering questions about Apollo 10 and the Museum’s Space Technologies collections.

The Science Museum will be also be sharing images and taking questions via Twitter using @sciencemuseum and #Apollo10.

Content Developer Rupert Cole on unboxing objects from CERN for Collider, a new Science Museum exhibition opening in November 2013.

There are not many things that would persuade me to wait for a van in the rain at 7am; but this was not to be missed. For on this particular cold, wet and early morning at the Science Museum, our hotly-anticipated Collider objects were due to arrive from CERN.

8am. An hour on and the van was here. Evidently, good objects come to those who wait.

Unveiling the LHC crates. Credit: Harry Cliff

Maybe it was the fact we had been working with only object dimensions and tiny pictures, but the first sight of even just the crates, in their various sizes and shapes, suddenly made the exhibition feel all the more real and tangible.

Broadly there were two concerns. Was everything there? And how to shift a two-tonne superconducting dipole magnet, aka “the Beast”? Luckily, on hand to help with the latter was a forklift truck – naturally, delivered by a bigger truck.

One forklift truck. Credit: Harry Cliff

Once the two-tonne Beast had been fork-lifted over to the Goods Lift (conveniently situated up a slope) there was the small matter of getting it in. At this stage, ascertaining whether everything had come relied on the skilful art of imagining which object might fit in which crate. Given the variety of objects, ranging from a 22-cm delicate crystal detector piece to a whopping 2-metre-long iron magnet, guessing according to the logic of packing was relatively straight forward.

Later, came the Christmas-esque joy of cracking open the crates and seeing the LHC treasures in the flesh. Looking at the cross-section cut of the dipole magnet, it was nice to see that even “the Beast” had a friendly face.

Dipole magnet cross section. Credit: Harry Cliff

After the museum conservators have polished various nooks and crannies, and the workshop team have made some mounts, the objects will be installed into this empty gallery – and soon after that, the gallery will make its dramatic transformation into the world’s greatest scientific experiment.

Exhibition space ready for the Collider exhibition. Credit: Ali Boyle

Come and experience the sights and sounds of CERN at Collider, a new immersive exhibition opening this November at the Science Museum. Book tickets here.

Much like our Explainers here at the museum, the theatre group perform free science shows for visitors at the DGSTM – the main difference being their performers are mostly between the ages of 6 and 12 years!

Kitted out with beautiful costumes and having meticulously learned their scripts in English, the young performers presented a variety of shows to Science Museum visitors. We learned about the fascinating life of the humble ant in the Amazing Ants show, as well as some lessons about marine conservation in Dr Shark and the Café de Coral. Finally two of the adult performers from the DGSTM dispelled some myths about magic in their interactive show The Magic of Science.

Creatures of the deep

Learning about the delicate balance of the marine eco-system

The Magic of Science with ‘magicians’ Newton and Curie

The visit from the lively theatre group came out of a growing partnership between the DGSTM and the Science Museum following a visit to Dongguan from our outreach team in November last year.

Members of the outreach team worked closely with the DGSTM and the British Council and were able to reach over 7000 people over two weeks in China and Hong Kong. The team performed the ever popularFeel the Force show along with the Mission to Mars workshop.

Investigating magnetism during ‘Feel the Force’

Outreach officer Shane launching rockets with children at the Dongguan Science and Technology Museum

The Science Museum is working to coordinate regular visits to China so it was a great opportunity to reciprocate the DGSTM’s hospitality in hosting their performances here in London.

The shows went down a treat with museum visitors as well as members of local Chinese community groups who attended the performances. Some members of the audience even had the chance to pose for photos with the performers!

A global Q&A session, better known as Ask a Curator Day, takes place on Wednesday (18th Sept). Will Stanley, who manages the @sciencemuseum Twitter account, explains more…

What’s the story behind that object? How was it invented? Which is your favourite? Whenever I see a Science Museum curator, I find myself asking questions (and often tweeting about the result). Now it’s your turn. On Wednesday, our curators will answer your questions (between 1-6pm) for #AskACurator day.

You can delve into the Secret Life of the Home, with Helen Peavitt, our Curator of Consumer Technology – just ask Helen how fridges changed the world – or tweet a question for Katie Maggs, our resident medical collections expert.

If communication is more your thing, our Keeper of Technologies and Engineering, Tilly Blyth (@tillyblyth) has been looking at 200 years of communication technologies for new gallery, Information Age. Content developer Charlotte Connelly (@connellycharlie) even visited Cameroon in her quest for mobile phone related objects for the gallery.

Rosanna Denyer, from our Learning Support Team, writes about an often overlooked object from the museum collection.

The food we eat has changed over time, and with the development of new technologies so has the way we cook and prepare our meals. Microwave ovens, like this Amana Radarange Touchmatic from 1978, have contributed to changes in both our diet and lifestyle.

Amana Radarange Touchmatic microwave oven, 1978

The microwave oven was invented in 1945 by an engineer called Percy Spencer. He was researching military uses for radar technology and an accidental side effect of this was the invention of the microwave oven. After standing in front of a magnetron, Spencer noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. To test this further he then held a bag of corn kernels near the magnetron and watched as they exploded into popcorn.

Spencer found that microwaves, such as those emitted from his radar equipment, caused the water molecules in food to vibrate and heat up, which caused the food to cook. Recognising the potential of this, Spencer used the magnetron to create the first microwave ovens, which arrived in Britain in 1959.

After many years of using traditional ovens, the microwave oven was a startling change. Previously cooking had been a slow process, but now whole meals could be prepared in just a few minutes.

Some argue that the invention of the microwave brought about ‘the rise of the ready meal’. The first ‘TV Dinner’ was produced in 1954 and 10 million were sold in the first year alone. Since then, the popularity of ‘convenience food’ has grown and grown and the chilled ready meal market in the UK is now worth over £2.6 billion each year. Busy lifestyles, long working hours and an increased number of women in work are all seen as factors contributing to the popularity of microwaveable food.

But what does this mean for our health? Studies in 2012 suggested that less than 1% of supermarket ready meals complied with the World Health Organisation’s nutritional guidelines and some studies have shown that microwaving food can significantly reduce the nutrients contained within.

Despite this, the popularity of the microwave oven does not seem to be decreasing, and until a faster and more convenient way of cooking is invented, the microwave is likely to remain an essential piece of equipment in many kitchens.

Content Developer Rupert Cole, and Science Museum Fellow of Modern Science Dr. Harry Cliff, celebrate the LHC’s 5th birthday for Collider, a new Science Museum exhibition opening in November 2013.

Five years ago, at breakfast time, the world waited anxiously for news from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The first nervy bunch of protons were due to be fired around the European lab’s latest and biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), as it kicked into action.

Some “mercifully deluded people” – as Jeremy Paxman put it – feared the LHC would do no end of mischief. There was talk of planet-swallowing black holes, the transformation of the Earth into a new state of “strange” matter, and even the prospect of the obliteration of the entire universe. But for those of more sensible dispositions, the LHC’s first beam was an occasion for great excitement.

As the protons sped all the way round the 27km tunnel under the countryside between Lake Geneva and the Jura Mountains, thousands of physicists and engineers celebrated decades of hard work, incredible ingenuity and sheer ambition. Together they had created the largest-ever scientific experiment.

After the LHC was switched on, project leader Lyn Evans said, “We can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe.”

Operating a massive particle accelerator requires much more than flicking a switch – thousands of individual elements have to all come together, synchronised in time to less than a billionth of a second.

University College London’s physicist Jon Butterworth recalls a “particularly bizarre memory” from that day. Relaxing in a Westminster pub after an exhausting LHC event in London, Butterworth found he could follow live updates from his own ATLAS experiment on the pub’s TV.

Time for a rest. Credit: CERN

Particle physics continued to make news. The following fortnight’s joy turned to dismay as an accident involving six tonnes of liquid helium erupting violently in the tunnel – euphemistically referred to as “the incident” – damaged around half a mile of the collider, closing the LHC for a year.

Since then, besides the brief setback that was “baguette-gate”, a bizarre episode when the collider was sabotaged by a baguette-wielding bird, the LHC has been producing great work. Hundreds of scientific papers have been published by the CERN experiments, on topics as diverse as searches for dark matter candidates, the production of the primordial state of matter (known as quark-gluon plasma) and precision measurements of matter-antimatter asymmetries.

However, it was on July 4 last year, that the LHC snared its first major catch with the discovery of the Higgs boson – as one of the most significant scientific finds of the century. The Higgs boson was one of the longest-sought prizes in science – it was almost fifty years ago in 1964 that three groups of theorists laid the ground-work for what would become the final piece of the theory known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics. They proposed an energy field, filling the entire Universe that gives mass to fundamental particles.

This “Higgs mechanism” neatly explained why the weak nuclear force was so weak and why light is able to travel over infinite reaches of space. It also laid the groundwork for the unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces into a single “electroweak” force, in a coup similar to James Clerk-Maxwell’s unification of electricity and magnetism in the 19th century.

Peter Higgs at CERN’s public announcement of the Higgs Boson, 4 July 2012. Credit: CERN

However, like air, the Higgs field itself is invisible; the only way to know if it is there is to create a disturbance in it, like a breeze or a sound. It was Peter Higgs who first suggested that if the field existed, it would be possible to create such a disturbance, which would show up as a new particle. Hence, the boson was named after him, much to the irritation of some of the other five theorists responsible for the theory.

The LHC’s discovery of the Higgs closed a chapter in the development of fundamental physics, placing the keystone into the great arch of the Standard Model. The LHC is currently being upgraded so that in 2015 it will reopen at almost double its previous energy. What every scientist is now aching for is a sign of something new, physics beyond the Standard Model, and most probably beyond our wildest aspirations.

Through the past, present and future, follow the compelling drama, the amazing achievements and the inspirational hopes of the LHC at Collider, a new exhibition opening this November at the Science Museum.

We love receiving letters from our visitors and we always try our best to write back as soon as possible.

In fact, most of the letters we receive are from primary schools that have just visited the Museum.

Kids being kids, they can be brutally honest in telling us their likes (e.g. big bangs!) and dislikes (also big bangs).

The pupils from Parkhill School visited the Launchpad and saw the Flash! Bang! Wallop! Launchpad show on their outing to the Museum. One pupil said she learnt so much that her science grade increased a level! (click to enlarge letters)

Enjoyed bridge building and thought that listening to music through your teeth is ‘freaky’ inside Launchpad

Radhika enjoyed the electrical circuits and wanted to see more ‘mindblowing shows’

Krupa was ‘shocked’ by how much she learnt and has now gone up a level in Science

Explainer Fact: If you would like to send us a letter, please send it to: Launchpad Letters, Science Museum, Exhibition Raod, South Kensington, London, SW7 2DD